How To Approach Social Media as a Business

By Courtney Albert | Small Business

The most important thing to understand about social media is that you can always do more. Knowing how to approach social media as a business is a necessity for companies big and small, startups, and Web-based ecommerce sites. Why? Because it is efficient, affordable, and effective. Doing it properly, however, is a bit of a challenge.

How To Approach Social Media as a Business

Professional Social Media

One of the ways you can set your business’ social media campaign apart from the thousands of others out there is to create a professional publishing schedule and focus on quality over quantity. These two elements can help you generate hundreds of followers, shares, likes, re-tweets, and conversions to your website with the right approach.

Scheduling: Consistency is key. In small businesses, for instance, it is easy to overlook or forget about social media when there are dozens of other tasks to handle. On the flipside, it is just as easy to overdo social media. To avoid this, marketers need to implement a schedule that helps them keep up with publishing. This includes Facebook posts, tweets, pins, blogs, and other types of media.

Quality: It isn’t had for people to hide or unfollow your posts and updates. To avoid this, ensure that everything you send out is of the highest quality. This means high-res images, no spelling errors or grammar mistakes, and intriguing content. Even if you’re struggling to get leads, it is important for your business’ reputation to stick with quality every time.

Crossing Platforms

Regardless of your industry, you need to have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Other platforms like Instagram and Pinterest may suit your needs, though a heavy industrial company could have a hard time generating anything out of their campaigns.

One of the best ways to approach social media as a business is to recycle posts and updates. This does not mean you should plagiarize your own stuff; instead, you can use sites like Twitter to re-post an update you did this morning on Facebook.

Let’s take a blog as an example. Once written, you can put your blog on your blog site, website, then share a link through Twitter, post a short synopsis on Facebook, explain the business-esque reasons of your blog on LinkedIn, and do the same on Google+. This is a great way to keep your channels active.

It is important to understand that every platform has different audiences. Facebook users, for instance, tend to be the most unforgiving because they would rather see what their friends are up to rather than your business. To counter this, you need to post and share statuses that are eye-catching, informative, and entertaining.

Capturing Followers

The goal of social media is to inform and create hype about your business. As mentioned above, the best way to do this is to post info that people want to read. But what is that, exactly? Consider taking polls or querying your followers on what that might be. You can also track the success of your posts and see which ones generate the most likes and shares.

Timeliness is another important factor. To approach social media as a business, you need to publish business-type things. This includes trends in your industry, product and service updates, and other information that relates to you as a company. It is crucial that you make these interesting as well.

Blogging Basics

In today’s social media world blogs are slowly becoming the best way to increase followers and shares. Blogs, as opposed to press releases and lengthy Web articles you write about your own company, are meant to be interesting. Every blog you write should have a takeaway and forgo any overly-promotional content; instead, focus on writing blogs that are shaped around your successful posts.

The insight on creating posts applies to blogs, too. Do not sacrifice your business’ social integrity by pushing out a dozen C-grade blogs a week. Only publish polished ones that you are proud enough of to post links to on Facebook and other social media platforms.

YouTube videos, short clips through Vine and Instagram, and other multimedia require the same eye for detail. In closing, you need to approach social media as a business from a professional perspective in order to make it worth your while.